Archive
This year’s four-day J Street U Student Summit in Washington, D.C. was followed shortly by both the Passover holiday and President Obama’s quick trip to the Holy Land – yet the organization’s student leadership made a pointed effort to avoid the low-hanging fruit of the Passover metaphor. However, many an interlocutor capitalized on the intersection […]
Ever read the Bible cover to cover? Think it’s a bit strange so much of our society is built by a book most people never read in its entirety? Listen to one little podcast, and your relationship to this all-pervasive text may change radically. Enter OMGWTFBIBLE. Each month on this monthly podcast, a guest reads […]
From the mound of peeling matzah box empties, it looked like a massive Passover seder was brewing. Instead, Ambacht Brewery co-owner Tom Kramer was tossing the discarded boxes to the brewery floor after adding crushed up matzoh to a bubbling mash of soon-to-be Matzobraü Beer. Matzobraü beer is the after-Passover brew of a two-room brewhouse […]
It’s a challenge to have anything feel new and exciting after a few times of doing it. In a conversation that usually arises within the context of prayer, those of us who perform religious ceremonies often bemoan the impossibility of connecting emotionally to that which so easily becomes rote and stale with repetition. The same […]
Should a Modern Orthodox woman wear a skirt or pants? Should she eat vegetarian at a non-Kosher restaurant? Should she go to frat parties on Shabbat? To answer questions like these, one woman, who calls herself “The Rebbetzin,” started a blog a couple weeks ago called Frum in Skinny Jeans. While “The Rebbetzin” would like […]
“Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play. Hope you can make my bar mitzvah day. Thirteen years since I was born, and the party won’t stop till Sunday morn.” Yes, that is actually the hook for Daniel (sans last name)’s Bar Mitzvah invitation. The difference? He raps the words in a music video, rather than […]
Imagine my delight to see this face staring out at me as I browsed my morning newsfeeds. That’s right America, Aly Raisman is back in the spotlight. And girl can dance. Though last I heard she wanted to start her own fashion line, Aly is taking a short detour into a different world of heels […]
Headwear is kind of a big deal in Judaism. The accurate assertion is often made that, in Jerusalem, you can learn a lot of information about someone just by looking at what hats they wear. On college campuses, certain flat-brimmed baseball caps or the occasional fedora might tell you something about an individual, but they […]
Alan Gross, a 64 year old Jewish contractor for the U.S. government pro-democracy program, USAID, has been held in Cuba since 2009 when he was arrested for bringing satellite phones with capability of connecting to the Internet to Cuba’s Jewish community as part of his USAID responsibilities. Cuba accused and convicted him of “Acts against […]
In a winning moment for my boss, JTA sent out a News Alert on Wednesday that he had predicted hours earlier. Said boss, a certain David A.M. Wilensky, posted this on his Facebook wall at 3:21 PM, about an hour after the new pope was named: In Jewish newsrooms the world over: The new pope is […]